Reforms will elevate consumer protection up the compliance agenda, impose new transparency requirements and potential sanctions, and bring data-as-payment services within the ambit of consumer law The New Deal for Consumers initiative consists of two pieces of legislation. The first creates a right for EU citizens to come together as a class and pursue representative actions against the company for compensation for breach of consumer law. The second updates existing consumer laws by introducing General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)-style fines and bringing in new obligations in relation to selling via platforms and marketplaces. This second piece of legislation is known as the Omnibus-Directive. The steps now taken by the EU via the Omnibus-Directive will lead to a tightening of EU-wide consumer protection and unfair competition laws, which will also affect traditional online retailers in many respects. As a consequence, the Omnibus Directive will not only affect B2C sellers and major e-commerce platforms or retailers, but absolutely everyone offering anything to consumers online.

The EU launched the New Deal for Consumers initiative in 2018 in order to modernise and strengthen the enforcement of EU consumer law. This came in the wake of various scandals including "Dieselgate". The EU’s own comprehensive fitness checks of consumer and marketing law, meanwhile, made it clear that the existing consumer protection laws lacked "teeth", meaning that compliance was low on the corporate agenda. The Commission’s checks also revealed that numerous existing European laws were in desperate need of modernisation to take account of the digitalisation of the economy over the past decades.

The New Deal for Consumers (along with the associated Digital Content Directive and the Sale of Goods Directive, discussed below) has three core elements:

1. further and stricter transparency obligations;
2. GDPR-style fines for infringements; and
3. data as “payment”.

Under the New Deal for Consumers, there will be various new information obligations in relation to e-commerce. For example:

• Reviews: if product reviews are available, the trader must provide information on whether and how it ensured that reviews were actually submitted by consumers who used or purchased the products.
• Price reductions: each time a price reduction is advertised, the previous price (meaning the lowest price offered by the trader during a period of at least 30 days before the price reduction) must be shown in the advert.
• Profiling: if the price displayed to the consumer has been personalised on the basis of automated decision making or the creation of profiles of consumer behaviour, traders are obliged to inform consumers about this fact.
• Ranking: marketplaces (and potentially other traders using ranking mechanisms that apply not just to their own products) will be obliged to publish the main parameters used to determine the ranking of the products, as well as the criteria on the importance given to these parameters. This is essentially a B2C-sequel to the ranking-information obligations under the Platform-to-Business Regulation which became applicable in summer 2020 and contains similar information obligations for platforms in a B2B context.